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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Food Waste

Hazel’s New CEO Focused on Diversifying Life Extention Products and Expanding Geographically

Today, produce life extension startup Hazel Technologies named Parker Booth as its new CEO. Booth, who has had a varied career in produce distribution, vertical farming, as well as a stint as general manager of Washington State Correctional Industries, takes on the new role after serving three-plus years as the company’s chief operating officer.

Booth, who has been in the role of CEO on a temporary basis, takes over the role permanently as he replaces Aidan Mouat, who was involved in an accident last September that left the company’s founding CEO fighting for his life. The accident, in which a motorist struck Mouat as he was out walking his dogs (both dogs were killed in the accident) in a suburb of Chicago, has left Mouat unable to fulfill the role as he is still in active recovery. According to Booth, Mouat will remain as an advisor to the company.

I caught up with Booth last week to talk about the state of the company and where he sees things going under his leadership.

Can you give me an update on Hazel and what’s been happening over the past year?

We’re an eight-year-old company, and we’re past the stage of ‘does our technology work?’ It’s been proven that it does. It’s now one of customer adoption and executing our scale-up plans. We’re excited about that. We’ve added some new technology through the acquisition of a company’s assets last year that extend the shelf life of berries, and large berry growers are really latching on to this.

How does this new product differ from Hazel’s sachet product?

Hazel CEO Parker Booth

The intellectual property is a membrane about 10 inches by 10 inches. When you take a pallet of a product like berries, you put this giant bag over the top of it, seal it up, and then inject CO2 in the membrane. Again, it’s very similar to the concept of breathable saddlebags, as you’re allowing co2 to transmit through that membrane and equilibrates at a certain level that inhibits decay for berries, for raspberries in particular. It’s a really proven technology, and we’re excited about that. We’re going to be looking at bananas in Southeast Asia. It has a pallet option, but has a carton option, a little smaller bag with a smaller membrane. And so that just gives us a lot more conversations with the customers.

So Hazel is now a life extension technology company, essentially, with a variety of tools.

Yes, so far in our life, we’ve had 5 billion pounds of produce we’ve used our detection technology on, and we’ve eliminated 400 million pounds in waste. We like to track that metric because that’s our mission.

But that’s it. Shelf life extension that reduces yield loss. And that becomes an actual, very objective data point for the owner of the product. So we can say we’re going to save you ‘X dollars per carton’ or per shipment by using Hazel. That’s a bottom line benefit for them. That savings goes right to the customer’s bottom line.

Can you give me an update on the sachet business?

We had our first customer five years ago, and it’s been ramping up ever since. One change we made is that at the beginning, we were producing our product internally, making our secret sauce, and packing the sachets. About two years ago, we began to outsource manufacturing to third-party contract manufacturer who specializes in this. They use our recipe, they use our quality standards, and we check them on all that. We did this because they can scale to the volume that we need to keep up with the business.

For those who aren’t familiar with your sachet product, can you explain how it works?

There’s a component in there called 1-MCP (short for 1–Methylcyclopropene). It’s been around for a long time, and what we do is combine the 1-MCP into that secret sauce – which has different sorts of materials – into a sachet, and that becomes a very slow release. That’s the benefit of our product. What happens is we attach the materials through a vapor to the ethylene (the natural ripening hormone in fruit) receptors that actually emit ethylene in a product and stop the ethylene from being created.

What other products do you have?

We actually have a product called Datica that senses ethylene, it senses 1-MCP, and so it’s instant feedback for apple long-term storage. It’s an internet-connected device and software that traces the levels of 1-MCP and, as a result, detects the real-time level of the ethylene.

Another product called Hazel Trex is focused on pre-harvest. What that does is it allows growers of, say, kiwis to predict within a day or two accuracy when the bud is going to bloom for kiwis. Now, why is that important? They could hit it with nutrients just prior to that if they knew exactly when it’s going to be. So it’s a cost savings for them.

Was one of the goals after the last funding round to diversify the product portfolio as you become a more mature company?

It was to build out our fundamentals, and expand our product line, but also expand the countries that we’re in. We’re trying to get the footprint expanded. It’s very important in the produce world that you’re in the southern hemisphere as well as the northern hemisphere. That way, you get a year-round cycle, a year-round supply for, say, table grapes. A grower might have table grapes coming out of Peru, which are just ending now, and now you move on to table grapes coming out of California for the US market. We have a plan that, in the next five years, we will be in 23-plus countries with various products.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Mill Nabs First Municipal Pilot in Partnership With the City of Tacoma

Mill, a startup that makes a home food waste management appliance that turns food scraps into chicken feed, has captured its first municipal pilot in a partnership with Tacoma, Washington, the company announced this week.

The company partnered with the city of Tacoma to launch a pilot program that uses technology to address residential food waste. As part of the program, Tacoma residents will receive priority access to Mill Memberships, which they will pay directly to Mill at the cost of $33 per month. According to the News Tribune, the city “gained priority access to at least 600 Mill memberships and access to new data that can help inform the city on waste prevention and food-waste reduction projects.”

A Mill subscription, announced last month, is a $33-a-month subscription and includes a kitchen bin and a pickup service for the processed Food Grounds. Once Mill customers activate their bin via Wi-Fi, they can start tossing food scraps. Once the bin is full, they put the Food Grounds into a prepaid box and schedule a pickup with the Mill app.

“We are proud to be at the forefront of creative public-private solutions to tackle the challenging problem of food waste in landfills. The City of Tacoma began collecting and recycling residential food waste in 2012—since then, diverting up to 1,000 tons per year of compostable food waste from landfills. With this first-of-its-kind-agreement with Mill, we are excited to be the first municipality in the country to pilot this innovative new approach to preventing food waste and to support residents who want a better kitchen experience and want to take practical action to address climate change at home,” said Lewis Griffith, City of Tacoma Solid Waste Division Manager.

It will be interesting to see how many Tacoma residents subscribe to the Mill service. One incentive could be offsetting the cost by moving to a smaller garbage can; according to the city, food scraps make up 28% of residential waste, and by taking food waste out of their garbage can by using the Mill, residents could save up to $25.60 by downsizing their container.

According to the announcement, the Mill memberships will be available to Tacoma residents starting next month.

Evigence Raises $18M for Its Food Freshness Sensors Small Enough to Fit on a Packaging Sticker

Food technology company Evigence announced the close of an $18m series B funding round this week. The company, which makes real-time food freshness detecting sensors, plans to use the money to further develop its system’s data collection and analytics capabilities and launch additional commercial partnerships in the US and Europe

Evigence’s sensors, which are small enough to be incorporated into a sticker that goes onto produce packaging, can detect the temperature and time passage and uses that data to calculate the current and projected freshness of produce. Retailers, distributors, and consumers can use them to determine the real-time freshness of a product. Evingen’s sensors can give visual cues such as through color change on the sticker or have an hourglass empty to let the consumer know when a product is no longer fresh.

You can watch the Evigence system in action below:

Real Time Freshness Monitors

“At Evigence, we aim to redefine the way the world manages fresh food”, said Evigence Founder & CEO Yoav Levy. “Today there is no objective way to measure freshness. Small variations in temperature during transit or storage can lead to waste of perfectly good food on one end of the spectrum, or problems with food safety on the other end. Date codes don’t account for these fluctuations. We want to change the paradigm.”

The company recently announced it is working with meal kit delivery company Marley Spoon by Martha Stewart. Marley Spoon implemented the Evigence solution, wich allows it and consumers to ensure freshness of meal kit ingredients when they arrive to customers’ homes. Evigence’s sensors track time and temperature exposure over the course of the meal kits’ shipping journey, from packing to the customers’ doorstep. When the meal kit arrives at home, customers can scan the sensor upon receipt of the meal kit to confirm freshness.

According to Levy, “tens of millions” of Evigence sensors have been deployed across a variety of food and beverage markets which has collectively resulted in 20% shelf life extension and 33% reduction in waste.

Mill Wants You to Create Chicken Feed Out of Food Scraps

Want to stop sending food waste to the landfill?

A new device and service from a company called Mill will help you do just that while also letting you feed a chicken or two while you’re at it.

Debuting today, the Mill kitchen bin, a new eponymous device from a company founded by a couple of ex-Nest execs, will take your food waste and shrink & “de-stink” it as it turns into what it calls Food Grounds, something the company says is a “safe and nutritious chicken feed ingredient.”

Here’s how it works:

You sign up for a Mill “Membership,” a $33-a-month subscription service that includes a kitchen bin and a pickup service for the processed Food Grounds. You connect the Mill to Wi-Fi, activate it using the Mill app, and start tossing in your food scraps. Once the bin is full, you put your Food Grounds into a prepaid box and schedule a pickup with the Mill app.

While it’s tempting to call the kitchen bin one of a new cohort of smart food composters, Mill wants you to know that its box is definitely not a composter. The Food Grounds “aren’t compost,” says Mill, because instead of having the food sit and get eaten by microbes, it’s processed into an edible chicken feed ingredient they say can be put back into the food system.

Still, aside from the chicken feed system, the Mill isn’t that different from some of the other composters we’ve written about. Like the Lomi and the Kalea, the machine accelerates the shrinking and drying of the food into something other than the original food waste you dropped into the container.

The framing of the Mill is primarily about sustainability and reducing food waste, and it’s a positioning that makes sense. If we’re going to throw food out, it’s better to have those scraps turned into something that can feed chickens or your local garden than end up in a landfill.

That said, the optimal solution for food is not to have it end up as food waste at all, but instead, have it eaten by humans. That’s why I’m hoping the Mill team’s next product will be something that helps us preserve food from entering a waste bin altogether.

For those interested, Mill is taking reservations now and plans to ship the kitchen bin this spring.

These New Scanners Will Help Us All From Squeezing (and Damaging) The Avocadoes

Every year, tens of thousands of tons of avocadoes are thrown into the trash or compost. Whether on the farm or in our fridges, the delicious fruit is one of the most difficult to get right when it comes to determining ripeness, resulting in a whole lot of wasted food.

One startup hoping to help us reduce the amount of avocadoes going to waste is OneThird, a startup out of The Netherlands that has built a line of spectral scanners that determine the freshness of an avocado.

When a OneThird scanner looks at the spectral fingerprint of an avocado, it compares the data gathered to its database to determine how ripe the fruit is and then sends the information to its app. You can see the scanner in action in the video below:

A Look at the OneThird Ripeness Checker at CES 2023

According to company CES Marko Snikkers, because farmers and distributors often don’t know how ripe avocados are, they will often ship the produce to retailers when it should have gone to a processor or some other application that can make use of ripe or overripe produce.

“What we try to do is give our customers the data so they know if it should go to the store or be repurposed for other methods such as dry freeing or juices,” said Snikkers.

The company debuted their in-store version and the quality lab version of their scanners at CES 2023.

OneThird isn’t the only company with a spectral imaging scanner targeted at grocery retailers to determine avocado freshness. In October of last year, Apeel debuted their avocado scanner, which it built using technology acquired from Impact Vision.

I for one am looking forward to seeing one of these scanners in my local grocery store, not only because it’s hard to determine freshness without it, but also because it would hopefully prevent me and others from squeezing the fruit.

“We all squeeze,” said Snikkers. “And that is definitely damaging the avocadoes.”

Israel’s Wasteless Uses A.I. As A Solution for Food Waste

The aptly named Wasteless is a triple threat as it offers a solution that simultaneously benefits retailers, consumers, and the environment. The Israeli company provides an AI-driven solution to cut down on food waste in retail by allowing supermarkets to give consumers dynamic pricing based on the freshness of a given product.

Wasteless has reached a milestone in announcing a partnership with Hoogvliet, a leading European supermarket chain with over 70 stores across The Netherlands. Using Wasteless’ dynamic pricing technology, the retailer will reduce food waste by optimizing costly price markdowns. This partnership forms part of a wider store rollout to stop throwing viable perishable goods into the dumpster, increasing margins while benefiting shoppers and the planet.

“The E.U.’s supermarkets alone are responsible for nearly 7% of all food waste, leading to more than 15 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions,” Oded Omer, Co-Founder, and CEO of Wasteless, said in a company press release. “By the time this waste occurs, all the energy and resources have already gone into the food. It’s the costliest waste we’re creating – indeed, it costs each store up to 4% of its revenues. In addition, Wasteless will help customers make smarter grocery decisions. Our solution also helps retail managers by optimizing inventory control systems. Joining forces with leading innovative retailers like Hoogvliet means we’re another step closer to saving the environment and achieving our goal of reducing food waste in retail by 80% while increasing retailers’ profits. This is a concrete step toward the Food Waste Pledge we signed at the COP27 Climate Conference and other signatories, including the World Wildlife Fund.”

Speaking to the origins of the company, Omer told The Spoon, “I stood in the supermarket, and I said to myself, well, it doesn’t make sense that I’m going to pay the same price for Chobani for that expires in two days and six days,” he recalled. “So, I started to contact some the academic professors and so on, and to understand the perspective of revenue management.”

That revelation in 2016 led to Wasteless, a machine-learning system embedded in a retailer’s data center. It can be applied using electronic shelf markers (which are more common in the E.U. than in the U.S.) or stickers applied to anything from meat and poultry to apples and salad greens. The pricing scheme is done in small increments using sell-by and consumer shopping data. Wasteless’ pricing can also be applied using a consumer-facing application.

To date, Wasteless is backed by $9.75M in funding, led by Slingshot Ventures (N.L.), Zora Ventures (U.S.), SOSV (U.S.) IT-Farm (Japan), Food Angels (Germany), strategic industry-related investors, and Israel Innovation Authority grants.

In 2021, Wasteless announced a collaboration with NX-Food, a German food tech hub, to bring its pricing systems into stores from METRO, one of the world’s leading wholesale specialists. Omer summed up the win-win bottom line for implementing dynamic pricing. “It’s a huge win for us as we grow and show the world what our technology is capable of. Most importantly, this is a huge win for the environment. There’s a lot of talk about sustainability in business, but it only really works if it’s also profitable.”

Re-Nuble Aims to Use Food Waste To Make Indoor Agriculture More Sustainable

The role of indoor growing, ranging from small indoor vertical farms to large greenhouses, is vital to sustaining the world’s food supply. Controlled Environmental Agriculture is essential for growing crops in underused spaces, rooftops, and rows of vertical gardens. Seizing upon this vital resource, Tinia Pina, Founder & CEO of ReNuble, has taken up the challenge to help this idea scale. With a best-in-class nutrient and growing medium, Pina’s company has created organic compounds sourced from food waste for sterile, technology-driven hydroponic and soilless systems.

For the dynamic Pina, her vision for what became Re-Nuble started more than six years ago in the New York school system. “I also saw our outreach educational classes for this program were from 8 a.m. until 3 p.m.,” she recalled in an interview with The Spoon. “I noticed what the kids were bringing for class for lunch, and those options were very processed. With that diet, you see a direct impact on their level of attention. And I felt, from a systemic perspective, that will immediately impact the type of productivity and retention of the information we’re teaching. So overall, I always felt that people with better access to nutrition are spending more time being able to be fully immersed and retaining the information. And they are calling less out of work with fewer sick days.”

The genesis of Re-Nuble’s solution, Pina goes on to explain, came from her observation of how food waste was disposed of. “At that time, New York was spending $77 million to export its food waste to China, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. And that’s simply because we don’t have the composting infrastructure to handle it,” Pina said.” I wondered how we could make food waste a consistent alternative for conventional synthetic fertilizers by doing it for soils or hydroponic systems. So, we focused on using food waste as a viable alternative for chemical fertilizers in indoor grow environments.”

Specific to its product lines, Re-Nuble’s Head of Business Development & Strategy, Riyana Razalee, said in a company press release, “CEA is a large part of the future of farming, and so, we have to prioritize its role in decarbonization. Solutions need to address the gamut of the food supply chain, decarbonizing as many parts of it as possible. This vital issue is what our team is focused on”. The company states that for every acre of an indoor farm that uses Re-Nuble’s organic hydroponic nutrient, Away We Grow, the company can remove up to 5 metric tons of carbon emissions annually. That’s approximately one home’s energy use for a year.

In addition, its grow medium, ReNu Terra, supports the anti-peat movement. Companies, activists, and governments are demanding the reduction of drained peatlands. When farmed for agriculture needs, peat changes from a carbon sink to a greenhouse gas emitter, releasing approximately 1.9 gigatonnes of CO2e annually. This amounts to 0.4 billion gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for a year.

Pina said Re-Nuble has three customer segments now. First is the consumer market. Away We Grow could be part of a kit offered for an indoor growing system. “Consumers are eager to find more environmentally and people and animal-friendly solutions,” Re-Nuble’s CEO noted. The second segment is commercial farms such as Gotham Greens. The third, she said, is “disruptive farms.” For the last group, she stated, “There are severe supply shortages globally, and so there’s a lot of urgencies to find something that could be more sustainable, but even more importantly, something that they can afford.”

A Look at the Shelfy, a Smart Device That Aims to Reduce Food Waste in Your Fridge

Since the lack of innovation around food waste reduction in the home has long been a personal pet peeve of mine, I couldn’t help but get a little excited when I caught word of the Shelfy.

According to the gadget’s Kickstarter page, it is a “smart device that will make your food last longer” by purifying the fridge’s air. The Shelfy does this by sucking the fridge’s air into a ceramic filter and capturing bacteria. From there, “the pollutants are destroyed and not mechanically retained” using a process called photocatalysis.  

Vitesy, the company behind the Shelfy, retained the services of a testing lab by the name of CSI SpA – FPM (Food Packaging Materials Laboratory) to test the product and write a report attesting to its capabilities. The report concluded by saying, “the evidence from the present study returns encouraging results” and that the “organoleptic evaluations show that the module is effective in slowing the aging of the tested products, postponing the appearance of wilting, softening, staining and rotting.”

All this sounds encouraging, and the report and the testing agency look legit, but I’d caution anyone who thinks dropping the Shelfy into their fridge will make them a food waste warrior. The Shelfy won’t help you extend the life of any food in an air-tight food storage container, or things like meat, cheese, or other food products sitting inside its packaging. It also requires you to store things like greens openly in the fridge, which is different from how many bring these food home from the store.

In other words, to take advantage of the Shelfy’s benefits, the product’s owners must orient their food storage behavior around the product itself. They also need to recognize that the Shelfy will not help them save everything. On the other hand, the product could make sense for those who are willing to create a system of different approaches and technologies to reduce food waste. And the gadget could be the perfect fit for those who struggle specifically with fruits and veggies going bad in the produce drawer.

Finally, it looks like the Shelfy already seems to have some competition in the form of other stand-alone fridge air purifiers available online and integrated air purifiers in high-end fridges such as Sub-Zero. While none of these (that I know of) use a similar ceramic filter system, these competing solutions reduce bacteria and gases like ethylene from the air that accelerates aging in food.

If you’re interested in the Shelfy, the product’s Kickstarter campaign runs for another couple weeks. Early bird pricing is about €94/$93 (there are only a couple left as of this morning), and the regular campaign price is €119/$117.

It’s always worth expressing a note of caution for any hardware crowdfunding campaign. However, prospective backers can take comfort in the fact that the company behind the product has previously shipped three different hardware products through Kickstarter.

Doing Avocado-Eaters a Solid the World Over, Apeel Introduces Avocado Freshness Scanning System

Today Apeel announced they would unveil new freshness detection technology for avocados this week at the Fresh Produce Association Global Produce & Floral Show.

The system, based on hyperspectral imaging technology, starts by shining a light that penetrates several millimeters below the skin. From there, it utilizes a sensor to measure how much light is reflected in the visible and near-infrared spectrum. Once scanned, the system’s AI predicts the avocado’s freshness and estimates shelf life by utilizing a “global avocado ripeness model” the company developed using machine learning based on “data on tens of thousands of avocados throughout multiple seasons, blooms, and countries of origin.”

The system, which is the evolution of the technology inherited by Apeel when it acquired Impact Vision last year, will be used in both a commercial implementation targeted at grocery retailers and distributors as well as in a scanner useable consumers to check freshness in the produce aisle.

The commercial-grade technology will feature a scanner and an “AI data model for imaging hardware in produce sorters” at packing houses and distribution centers. According to the announcement, the new scanner will detect freshness five times more quickly than traditional methods such as penetrometers (which poke holes in the produce to detect freshness). In addition, the new software will enable more accurate sorting, enabling distributors to target the proper retail channels based on the remaining shelf life.

While all that sounds great and represents a potentially significant advancement that could significantly reduce food waste, I can’t help but be a little more excited for the consumer retail scanner. If you’re like me, no fruit (yes, it’s a fruit) is more frustrating than the avocado; deliciously sublime when perfectly ripe, but hard as a rock if eaten too early and resembling the decaying flesh of a zombie if you’re just a couple of days too late. If this technology works, my days of throwing avocados into the compost bin may soon be coming to an end.

For Apeel, the new product line represents the first significant new product outside of the food tech unicorn’s flagship life-extension technology. According to the company, the technology will initially be limited to avocadoes, but they indicated they are working on extending it to other produce such as limes, mangos, and mandarins.

Vienna’s LIVIN Farms Receives €6 million to Upcycle Food Waste Into Insect-Powered Protein

Turning food waste into a usable commodity might seem like magic, but it’s a reality for companies such as Vienna-based LIVIN farms. The company has announced a €6 million Series A round led by venture Investor Peter Luerssen, allowing it to expand its team and solution.

As a player in the alternative protein space, LIVIN Farms developed HIVE PRO, a modular system for fully automated insect processing. HIVE PRO allows waste management companies and large-scale food producers to upcycle organic waste and by-products into valuable proteins, fats, and fertilizers.

In an interview with The Spoon, Katharina Unger, Founder of LIVIN Farms, explained her company’s process. “Livin Farms customers are largely food and feed processing companies and agricultural players that have access to at least several thousand tons of organic by-products every year. They typically make a loss on it by having disposal costs. Generally used feed substrates include by-products, surplus production from the bakery, potato, vegetable, and fruit processing industry, and pre-consumer wastes from retail and grain by-products.”

One of the critical elements of the LIVIN Farms solution is the use of black soldier fly larvae in its “plug-and-play” solution. A module is set up at a customer site, after which, as Unger says, her company operates it as a Farming as a Service (FaaS) model. The first step is when the organic waste of the customer is recycled on-site by being processed and prepared as feed for the insects. After that is completed, using a robotic handling machine moves the feed made from the organic food waste into pallet-sized trays. The machine then inserts seedlings (baby larvae) and empties the harvest-ready larvae from the trays.

At this point, insect Larvae are fed on recycled organic food waste in a climate-controlled environment. The insects are then ready to be harvested within seven days only. The final step is processing the insect larvae into protein powder and oils. The end product is three animal feed types high in protein, antibacterial, and antiviral properties.

LIVIN Farms LIVIN farms recently opened a fully up-and-running 1,400 square meter pilot site in Vienna where the HIVE PRO is demonstrated to interested customers.

Unger began her journey to building LIVIN Farms in 2013, she said. “The idea for Livin farms started when I developed the first device to grow the entire lifecycle of the black soldier fly larvae in a kitchen device to turn kitchen scraps into proteins ready to harvest. This prototype was patented and then turned into a tabletop farm for mealworms (The Hive) later on that was sold in the hundreds to more than 45 countries worldwide. Since 2019, Livin Farms has used our years of R&D to focus on industrial insect farming technologies.”

The company is working on projects throughout Europe, Unger said. LIVIN Farms hopes to have several installations over the next several years.

LIVIN Farms has previously secured a Seed investment round, grants, and subsidies from the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), Austrian Promotional Bank (AWS), and the European Innovation Council (EIC) under the European “Green Deal,” totaling more than $4 million €. The company believes its latest investment will lead to the “further growth of the company and will be used for expanding the LIVIN farms team, standardization of the technical solutions, and driving the initial scale-up phase.”

Watch: Food Waste Innovation Demo Day

Last week, The Spoon teamed up with the team from ReFED to showcase innovators building food waste reduction solutions to help food retailers and manufacturers to better manage their inventory, find secondary outlets for surplus and create systems and processes for optimal on-site handling.

ReFED Food Waste Action Network | Innovation Demo Day: Refine Product Management

Featured startups that presented during this one-hour session included Too Good to Go, Galley Solutions, and KITRO.

Watch the video above to hear more about their companies and see a panel moderated by The Spoon to hear how these companies are tackling challenges to accelerate adoption and working towards creating more equitable and sustainable environments both internally and for their customers.

From Grad School Project to $115 Million Series B: Afresh’s Matt Schwartz on Building an Operating System for Fresh Food

While in graduate school Matt Schwartz had an epiphany.

At the time, he was learning about the food system as part of Stanford University’s Earth Program and also participating in an internship with food tech investor Dave Friedberg, and it was this combination of advanced education with a front-row seat to food tech innovation that helped him to see the future.

“That’s when I came to believe that things were heading towards fresh,” Schwartz told me this week in a Zoom interview. “That we need to move towards a more nutrient-dense form of eating, a less calorie dense form of eating, to be able to nourish the world sustainably. And those two things converged into saying, I want to accelerate this fresh technology thing.”

The focus on fresh food soon led Schwartz and his eventual cofounder of Afresh, Nathan Fenner, to do a graduate study in which they talked to close to one hundred people involved in the food supply chain. It wasn’t long before they realized that, despite the increasing importance of fresh food for food retailers, there wasn’t any technology optimized for managing it.

Afresh’s Matt Schwartz

“We were going to Safeway, to Trader Joe’s, all these large, mega multibillion dollar chains, and they were all running this process on paper and pen,” Schwartz said. “Some retailers that had taken center store, non-fresh technology, and worked with like an IT consulting shop to customize the hell out of it and bend it into the fresh categories. And in that case, you’d still see lack of adherence and ultimately, at the end of the day, because it wasn’t a fit.”

These findings led Schwartz to create a company that built technology focused on managing fresh food in Afresh. Their first product, a software solution for managing fresh food inventory that Schwartz calls a ‘fresh operating system’, has been adopted by grocers of all sizes, ranging from small regionals to nationwide retailers such as Albertson’s (the Idaho-based grocer plans to install Afresh’s technology in 2,300 stores by end of 2023).

And it’s that growth, in which Afresh went from 200 stores using its technology at the end of 2021 to an expected 2000 installs by the end of this year, that is no doubt one reason the company was able to raise an impressive $115 million series B funding round announced this week. The round, led by Spark Capital, brings the company’s total funding to $148 million.

When I asked Schwartz why so many grocers are eager to better optimize management of fresh food inventories, he pointed to how even a company like Amazon found fresh challenging.

“So you look at Amazon, they bought Whole Foods because their pure-play Amazon Fresh was struggling to make a business out of direct delivery. And they didn’t stop there. They opened up their own grocery chain. But really, it was a play to crack into fresh, which is this huge part of the retail market that they couldn’t get a piece of otherwise.”

According to Schwartz, in a world where more consumers are buying commodity food items online, it’s the fresh department that is becoming an anchor for the physical point of presence in food retail. And, despite fairly low overall waste rates compared to other parts of the food supply chain – roughly 4-6% of fresh food is wasted at the store compared to over a third once it arrives in the home – he believes the 25% or so reduction in fresh food waste grocers experience using their system results in significant savings to the grocer’s bottom line.

While Afresh’s technology – a SaaS product running on an iPad – doesn’t have all the bells and whistles compared to some of the robotics and machine vision systems other startups have rolled out to help grocers with inventory management, Schwartz sees a future where all of the technology will work together.

“Where this is going is that there are robot companies, there are computer vision companies that are counting inventory, there are shelf life extension technologies, there are vertical farms, there are cold chain compliance technologies, and I believe that this is all an interconnected trend of fresh first technologies that are coming together to solve this growing problem that is increasingly strategic.”

And naturally, Schwartz sees his technology at the center of it all.

“We think about ourselves as the brain, that software layer that’s going to connect all of those things together,” Schwartz said. “So when the robots know an inventory position, or the computer vision can estimate the quality of the product, or we know whether that a berry was in cold chain compliance or not, all of that data can best fit into our system and drive the best outcomes and decisions for the retailers.”